The 1 Thing Civ NEEDS

[Atahualpa]

UberXrux: Lets not forget that you have special hardware ideally fitted for shooter Games (a GeForce3 Gfx Card). Without this specialised Hardware you couldnt play any shooters at 70+ frames. Civ3 on the other hand cannot make use of any specialised hardware. Civ3 has to rely on pure Computing Power. And on huge maps there are 16 civs!! You want them to be competitive and that takes up enormous calculating power. I think it is not that the maps are so huge that everything is slow. Rather it is the amount of civs. Eliminate some of the civs and I think you should experience a speed up.

[Atahualpa]

dubwai: And not forget to take DDR-SDRAM over normal SDRAM. Ofcourse only if you have a motherboard that supports DDR-SDRAM. If you have a P4 pray that you have the i850 chipset that supports Rambus RD-RAM. P4 sucks with any type of SDRAM.

[steelehc]

DP

[steelehc]

I have tried to generate for myself these obscene slow turn times. I created a map with all floodplain, and 16 civs. The empires should grow huge. My civ expanded to fill about 2/3 of the map after a while, and by industrial, my average turn time, over seven turns, was 12 minutes, 19 seconds. With an entire 256x256 map filled with cities. I don't understand what people are b1tching about here.

Specs:
Athlon 1400
1024MB PC-2100DDR-RAM
2x Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0 array
GeForce 2 Ultra 32MB DDR

Steele

[Ethelred]

Mike Breikutz has said the main thing slowing things down on larger maps is the pathfinding algorithim. Its not a bug from what he said. The time the algorithim takes exands exponentialy with map size. A lot of algorithims expand exponentialy as the number of choices expand.

Also I doubt the number of Civs matter as much as the number of units. Certainly if the pathfinder is the main time user anyway. On smaller maps the number of civs might be the determining factor as less time is spent on units and time spent on dealing with other civs become more significant.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by steelehc


was 12 minutes, 19 seconds.


With an entire 256x256 map filled with cities. I don't understand what people are b1tching about here.

Specs:
Athlon 1400
1024MB PC-2100DDR-RAM
2x Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM drives in a RAID 0 array
GeForce 2 Ultra 32MB DDR

Steele

I sorta think the time you had there is exactly what people are *****ing about.

Of course with you takin up 2/3 of the map the AI isn't spending a lot of time doing things.

Showoff.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
UberXrux: Lets not forget that you have special hardware ideally fitted for shooter Games (a GeForce3 Gfx Card). Without this specialised Hardware you couldnt play any shooters at 70+ frames. Civ3 on the other hand cannot make use of any specialised hardware. Civ3 has to rely on pure Computing Power. And on huge maps there are 16 civs!! You want them to be competitive and that takes up enormous calculating power. I think it is not that the maps are so huge that everything is slow. Rather it is the amount of civs. Eliminate some of the civs and I think you should experience a speed up.

He has more than I do, except for the chipset and 256M DDR vs 512M SDR. I have played Huge with 16 civs and not noticed a problem. Video generally should not effect AI turn times (the GPU is not calculating paths). Something else has to be going on here.

I completely beleive that UK and others are seeing slow performance where others are not. I just wish I, or Infogrames (they are responsible for support) could figure it out.

Marla's does seem to be a common denominator for slow performance. Is it over-sized huge? I mean bigger than random huge. Is there some other problem with it?

[Harovan]

I think the # of cities matters pretty much. Check the time the computer needs to recompute things when you found/capture/raze a city at a huge map. The more cities are at the map, the longer takes it. Not only linear, but may be even exponential.

My old specs: PII/350, 128 MB SDRAM, RIVA TNT 16 MB, SB AWE32. Standard maps were ok, large ran quite slow, huge and oversized (Marla's) were absolutely unplayable. My only try at Marla's ended in the early industrial age with 40 minutes AI moves. It's history, as this machine is now a DSL router .

My new specs: Athlon XP 1800+, 512 MB DDRAM, GeForce2 64 MB, CMI8738 onboard. Sufficient for me as I'm not much into ego shooters. First test, in the mid-medieval age with 12 (of total 16) civs on my continent, AI moves take about a minute, even though I REX'd and ICS'd like a madman. I think after finishing the first "huge" game I'll give Marla's another try.

[steelehc]

I said I was having times of 12 minutes. People are complaining about times of 35-45+ minutes. I have never seen anything approaching that. The largest time I found was 12 minutes 56 seconds.

Steele

[tishco]

i run avp1 on 1024*768 the whole time, never any slowdown, even when surfing net at the same time.

my specs are:
geforce 2 mx
512 ram the older type
1ghz athlon
20gb hd

[Ethelred]

People are complaining about times of 35-45+ minutes. I have never seen anything approaching that.

You have four times the processor power and 16 times the ram of the person that had 45 minute turns. Somehow I don't think they had have something ELSE bizzare going on to get such long times.

[steelehc]

Good point. My obscene amount of RAM may be related to this issue. But what about the people with P8 57Ghz 400GB RAM infinite HD machines complaining about super-long times?

Steele

[Ethelred]

Sorry I haven't a time machine to check on this. Where did you purchase yours? I might be interested in buying one myself. It would come in really handy if the energy cost isn't too high.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by steelehc
I said I was having times of 12 minutes. People are complaining about times of 35-45+ minutes. I have never seen anything approaching that. The largest time I found was 12 minutes 56 seconds.

Steele

I hard time trying to understand why you are even getting 12 minutes of turn time.

Somthing is a miss here.

[falsfire3401]

The only time I've had *any* issues with turn times is on Marla's gargantuan earth map.

I've played games on random-generated huge maps, 16 civs, that lasted right up and into the 2000's in modern times, and the turn times never exceeded about 30 seconds or so. And I don't have *that* powerful of a machine:

Athlon 1.4GHz
512MB regular SDRAM
2x40GB 7.2k drives in RAID-0 <--Civ3 on here
1x20GB 5.4k drive (emergency backup & storage in case RAID array ever fails)
VIA KT133A chipset m/b
Windows 2000 SP2
Tons o' tasks running in the background (just after opening windows BEFORE running any programs I'm already using 175MB of physical RAM)

And on Marla's map, the turn times, while annoying, were still bearable, at around 45 seconds/turn in the year 700AD (late part of middle ages era)